edmo:I'm gonna guess college students no longer have hours long, substance infused philosophical discussions these days.

Nope, my students and neighbors still do the "hanging out drunk talking about random shiat" thing. I catch the receiving end of it a lot because I'm old enough that I am capable of shutting my mouth even if I'm not sober.

edmo:I generally defend the younger folks every time we have a Bash the Millennial thread but I do have a complaint: none of them can say more than two sentences in a row on the same subject.

I'm gonna guess college students no longer have hours long, substance infused philosophical discussions these days.

This wouldn't be so bad if they would simply have sex instead. Sex and philosophy I can handle. What I can't handle is that they traded in sex and philosophy for craft beer making, Comic Con, and the Colbert Report.

spamdog:I'm more worried that people are going to grow up believing the kind of posturing bullshiat that everyone posts online, resulting in very status-conscious and dishonest people.

How is that different from what everyone has always done? People have always showed the world posturing bullshiat before the internet, you're just noticing it more now. There isn't a huge difference between Facebook and scrapbooking.

I cannot even have a proper discussion anymore. Too many people go into conversations KNOWING they are right, and refuse to listen to any evidence to the contrary. if you point it our, they take it as a personal attack, and get all offended

Oh dear god I was just joking about the idea of giving a young child a smartphone and one of those "Lets troll slashdot.org" questions comes up asking for advice on best smartphone for a god damn four year old... and there's several people in there seriously defending the idea.

That_Dude:How is that different from what everyone has always done? People have always showed the world posturing bullshiat before the internet, you're just noticing it more now. There isn't a huge difference between Facebook and scrapbooking.

Well, the bullshiat is easy to cut through if you know the person in real life. In other venues on the internet, you can't easily tell whether the person is just a fat wanker with severe deficits of self-esteem by just looking at them.

kkinnison:I cannot even have a proper discussion anymore. Too many people go into conversations KNOWING they are right, and refuse to listen to any evidence to the contrary. if you point it our, they take it as a personal attack, and get all offended

A corollary to that is that everyone seems to have their own definition of logic which they are convinced is actually logical.

spamdog:That_Dude: How is that different from what everyone has always done? People have always showed the world posturing bullshiat before the internet, you're just noticing it more now. There isn't a huge difference between Facebook and scrapbooking.

Well, the bullshiat is easy to cut through if you know the person in real life. In other venues on the internet, you can't easily tell whether the person is just a fat wanker with severe deficits of self-esteem by just looking at them.

On the other hand, you can't click 'ignore' on a person in RL and never have to hear their dribbling bullshiat ever again, either.

"'If you want a man to be honest, then give him a mask, turn the lights off, let nobody know who he is, and he doesn't have to worry about what you think about him,' he says."

And yet, when the internet did just that for him, "Eventually, he says, the person in his profile was wasn't really him anymore - just a version of the person he wanted to be."

/doesn't pass the smell test//and given the stuff I've heard on XBox Live, I think we should stop encouraging that much honesty///we have a civilization where everybody pretends they have their dark side under control for a reason, you know

Infernalist:spamdog: That_Dude: How is that different from what everyone has always done? People have always showed the world posturing bullshiat before the internet, you're just noticing it more now. There isn't a huge difference between Facebook and scrapbooking.

Well, the bullshiat is easy to cut through if you know the person in real life. In other venues on the internet, you can't easily tell whether the person is just a fat wanker with severe deficits of self-esteem by just looking at them.

On the other hand, you can't click 'ignore' on a person in RL and never have to hear their dribbling bullshiat ever again, either.

Where's the NoshiatSherlock tag when you need it it?Honestly though, as I get older, I've realized I really don't want to listen to what most people have to saySo, I kinda like textingDon't call meSay what you have to say in 165 characters or less

Tatterdemalian:"'If you want a man to be honest, then give him a mask, turn the lights off, let nobody know who he is, and he doesn't have to worry about what you think about him,' he says."

And yet, when the internet did just that for him, "Eventually, he says, the person in his profile was wasn't really him anymore - just a version of the person he wanted to be."

/doesn't pass the smell test//and given the stuff I've heard on XBox Live, I think we should stop encouraging that much honesty///we have a civilization where everybody pretends they have their dark side under control for a reason, you know

The purest form of this internet honesty can be found on fourchan's /b/. That's the human id laid bare for the world to see. Celebrated racism, sexism, glorification of death and disfigurement, mingled with bawl threads, boxxy love threads, and raids to avenge injured kittens.

And yet, when you strip away the bullshiat, /b/ is all about saying whatever they feel that they need to say, no matter how crude or taboo it might be. It's a place where the taboos of society are washed away by a flood of acidic cynicism.

Infernalist:On the other hand, you can't click 'ignore' on a person in RL and never have to hear their dribbling bullshiat ever again, either.

On the, uh, third hand, you can actually smash someone right in the face IRL if they piss you off enough.

Seriously though, I know we all know that claims about millenials being "entitled" or fundamentally worse than the last generation are largely bullshiat, but I think internet-only socialization is quite genuinely a new frontier in human interaction.

Danger Avoid Death:Infernalist: spamdog: That_Dude: How is that different from what everyone has always done? People have always showed the world posturing bullshiat before the internet, you're just noticing it more now. There isn't a huge difference between Facebook and scrapbooking.

Well, the bullshiat is easy to cut through if you know the person in real life. In other venues on the internet, you can't easily tell whether the person is just a fat wanker with severe deficits of self-esteem by just looking at them.

On the other hand, you can't click 'ignore' on a person in RL and never have to hear their dribbling bullshiat ever again, either.

Just throw up on them. It works. I swear by it.

I tell them that until they're made from the real thing I'm just not interested in girl scout cookies, but I guess that'd work too.

The purest form of this internet honesty can be found on fourchan's /b/. That's the human id laid bare for the world to see. Celebrated racism, sexism, glorification of death and disfigurement, mingled with bawl threads, boxxy love threads, and raids to avenge injured kittens.

And yet, when you strip away the bullshiat, /b/ is all about saying whatever they feel that they need to say, no matter how crude or taboo it might be. It's a place where the taboos of society are washed away by a flood of acidic cynicism.

Going to any site where speech is more restricted feels so wrong now. I see why reddit is the pile of shiat that it is. So much fake sentiment in posts, so much... muzzled speech, and reddit is one of the more relatively open sites on the net.

Some of the most profound stuff I've read have been from 4chan, along with a good majority of the most mindless drivel and about 99% of the gayest stuff I've ever seen. The profound stuff is worth putting up with the rest.

DownDaRiver:Where's the NoshiatSherlock tag when you need it it?Honestly though, as I get older, I've realized I really don't want to listen to what most people have to saySo, I kinda like textingDon't call meSay what you have to say in 165 characters or less

the good news is that people with this opinion will have their genes weeded out of society as they take refuge in one-room cabins in Montana or caves and the only time we hear of them is when one of them writes a manifesto and it gets posted online (at which point we quote various parts of it in meme pictures of cats)

Until then ... we must suffer these foolish ideas of how the perfect world should be and that everything is going to hell because it isn't exactly how they imagined it to be when they were ten.